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Coffee Bread
To one cup of light bread sponge add one cup of sugar, one egg, one cup of lukewarm milk, butter size of an egg (melted); add flour to make a stiff batter; let rise until light. Add one-half teaspoon salt, knead in enough flour to stiffen, roll out until about an inch and a half thick, put into a square pie-tin and let rise. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Bake in moderate oven.
— Mrs. Gilbert L. Jones
A yeast-raised sweet bread built on a piece of leftover bread sponge, from the days when a household always had one going. The name refers to what it was served with, not to any coffee in the dough.
- The sponge"Light bread sponge" is a batter of flour, water or milk and yeast that has been set to ferment and is bubbly and risen. If you are not already making white bread, substitute a cup of active poolish or a well-fed 100% hydration starter, with a pinch of instant yeast added to the dough for insurance; a household sponge of this period might have been raised with compressed yeast or with a homemade hop or potato yeast, and its flavour would have varied accordingly.
- Butter size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century cooks commonly measured fat by eye against familiar objects, an egg and a walnut being among the most frequent comparisons.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "moderate" is usually read today as somewhere around 350F. At an inch and a half thick this is a slab, not a loaf, so expect roughly 25 to 35 minutes; it should be done when the centre reads around 190F.
- The panA "square pie-tin" would be roughly an 8 or 9 inch square and shallow. Grease it well.
- Flour quantity is unstatedAs is usual in receipts of this period, and in any case it depends on the hydration of your sponge. Work toward a soft, slightly tacky enriched dough; something in the region of 3 to 3 1/2 cups total, added in the two stages the recipe directs.
- Rising timesThe first rise as a stiff batter will take 1 to 1 1/2 hours in a warm room; the second, in the pan, 45 minutes to an hour, until the dough is puffed and holds a fingerprint. Enriched doughs with sugar rise more slowly than plain bread dough.
- The toppingSprinkle the sugar and cinnamon after the pan rise, just before baking, and press it in very lightly. Doing it before the rise lets the sugar dissolve and weep into the crumb rather than forming a crust.
- YieldOne square pan, 9 to 12 pieces. Best the day it is baked; the crumb is lean by modern coffee-cake standards and stales quickly.
Coffee bread is often traced to the German Kaffeekuchen, though American versions draw on Scandinavian traditions as well — a plain yeasted dough, barely sweetened, rolled flat and dusted with cinnamon sugar, meant to be eaten with a cup of coffee rather than as a dessert. Recipes like this one turn up in nineteenth-century church and community cookbooks, and they share a defining trait: they begin with a cup of the bread sponge already sitting in the kitchen. That detail places the receipt firmly in a household that baked its own bread on a schedule, where a cup of active sponge cost nothing and the sweet bread was essentially a by-product of the week's loaves. The Catskill Cook Book, like most such compilations, gathered these under contributors' names — the recipe appears under the name of Mrs. Gilbert L. Jones, which is rather the point of a village receipt book.